MY DEAR BOY – Gay Love letters through the Centuries

Thursday, Friday and Saturday
January 5, 6 & 7 – 7:00 PM

Presented at Cleveland Public Theater's James Levin Theater as part of CPT's Big Box Series.

Developed from love letters written by prominent men throughout history from Marcus Aurelius to Allen Ginsberg, My Dear Boy expresses universal themes of human emotion and amorous relationships. The letters are a treasure trove of literary styles written with incredible emotional resonance; by turns heartfelt, hilarious, sexy, angry, intoxicating and above all, written with love.

Underscoring and enhancing these texts will be music of notable gay composers throughout history as well as the introduction of elements of movement and visual projections.

My Dear Boy is performed on a Double Bill with Amy Compton's solo, multi-disciplinary meditation about the aspects of love: THE DREAMER.

Cleveland Public Theater is located at:
6415 Detroit Road • Cleveland, Ohio

For information call 216.631.2727 or log on to: www.cptonline.org.

General Admission tickets are $15 with a $2 discount for students and seniors.

The Life and Works of Hart Crane: From Garretsville to Brooklyn and Beyond

Lakewood Public Library – National Poetry Month Celebration – April, 2012

The life of Hart Crane was tragically short, but his impact on the world of poetry was large and the list of those he has influenced is long. Tim Tavcar, the artistic director of WordStage invites you to contemplate the legacy of this buckeye-born literary giant through poems, letters and the music of his time.

Inspired by the epic achievement of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, yet also repulsed by its ironic despair, Crane challenged himself to articulate, "a mystic synthesis of America" that celebrated the possibility of life. Sometimes disturbing and often transporting, his body of verse emphasizes the strange beauty and innate spirituality of the modern world as he saw it at the dawn of the 20th century.

Tuesday, April 3 at 7:00 p.m. in the Lakewood Public Library's Main Library Auditorium

Eccentricities of The Velvet Gentleman

Friday and Saturday, September 21 & 22, 2012

Only decades after his death in 1925 was French composer Erik Satie hailed as a genius of contemporary classical music. His work was extremely simple in structure, yet innovative and marked by a characteristic wit. His reliance on unusual harmonic configurations was a reaction against the heavy, symbol-rich music of his era, a time when the works of Romantic European composers like Richard Wagner were still very much in vogue, and the highly decorated Impressionism of his friend, Claude Debussy, was ascendant. Satie left a relatively scarce body of work behind, most of it written for the piano. But his groundbreaking use of bitonal or polytonal elements would become a hallmark of twentieth-century modernist music.

Mentor and collaborator of the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, and Serge Diaghilev, Satie's music transcended the accepted norms of Romanticism and Impressionism of the time and influenced generations of French composers that followed. A prolific writer and cartoonist, Satie wrote fantastic diaries he titled Memoirs of an Amnesiac and was a regular contributor to such magazines as the Dadaist 351 and the publication that was, and continues to be, the arbiter of contemporary style and taste, Vanity Fair. It is from these sources the text of this WordStage presentation is derived.

West Side: West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Rocky River | 8:00pm - Friday, September 21, 2012
East Side: First Unitarian Church, Shaker Heights
8:00pm - Saturday, September 22, 2012

Edgar Allan Poe's The Facts in the Case of M. Valedmar

Friday and Saturday, October 26 & 27, 2012

ANOTHER EDGAR ALLAN POE SPOOKTACULAR!

Experience the spine-tingling sensations of the Halloween Season as you attend to a truly terrifying tale from the pen of "The Master of the Macabre", Edgar Allan Poe ~ "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" ~ an eerie essay on malevolent medicine, Machiavellian manipulation, deathbed disintegration and fantastic visions of the afterlife.

WordStage's annual offering from the fevered imagination of America's creator of "Tales and Poems of Mystery and Imagination" will be read by Marci Paolucci and Tim Tavcar and horrifically heightened by atmospheric music performed by the Javier Piano Trio – Ariel Clayton, violin, Carlos Javier, cello and HyunSoo Kim, piano - all artists of the Cleveland Classical Revolution – performing the music of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Shostakovich.

West Side: West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church,
Rocky River 8:00pm - Friday, October 26, 2012

East Side: First Unitarian Church, Shaker Heights
8:00pm - Saturday, October 27, 2012

PROUST In Love ~
The Story of Marcel Proust and Reynaldo Hahn

Friday and Saturday, February 8 & 9, 2013

"Everything I have ever done has always been thanks to Reynaldo." Marcel Proust

By the age of nineteen in 1894, the musical child prodigy, Reynaldo Hahn, had written many songs about love; however, his worldly sophistication masked shyness about his own personal feelings. He had close intimate friendships with women but he reportedly loved them only at a distance his whole life.
1894 was to prove a fateful year for Hahn. At the home of artist Madeleine Lemaire, he met an aspiring writer three years older than himself. The writer was the then little-known, "highly strung and snobby" Marcel Proust. Proust and Hahn shared a love for painting, literature, and the composer, Gabriel Fauré. They became lovers and often traveled together and collaborated on various projects. One of those projects, Portraits de Peintres (1896), is a work consisting of spoken text with piano accompaniment.

Hahn honed his writing skills during this period, becoming one of the best critics on music and musicians. Seldom appreciating his contemporaries, he instead admired the artists of the past (shown in his portraits of legendary figures). His writing, like Proust's, was characterized by a deft skill in depicting small details.

Proust's unfinished autobiographical novel Jean Santeuil, posthumously published and, by some, considered ill-structured, nevertheless shows nascent genius and foreshadows his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu. Proust began to write it in 1895, one year after meeting Hahn (on whom the hero is reportedly based). Although by 1896 they were no longer lovers, they remained mutually supportive colleagues until Proust's death in 1922.

West Side: West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Rocky River | 8:00pm - Friday, February 8, 2013

East Side: First Unitarian Church, Shaker Heights
8:00pm – Saturday, February 9, 2013

Frederic & George – L'Affaire Chopin/Sand

Dates To Be Announced

At the time when he came into George Sand's life, Chopin, the composer and virtuoso, was the favorite of Parisian salons, the pianist in vogue. He was born in 1810, so that he was then twenty-seven years of age. His success was due to his merits as an artist, and nowhere is an artist's success as great as in Paris. Chopin's delicate style was admirably suited to the dimensions and to the atmosphere of a salon. People said he was like his own music; the dreamy, melancholy themes seemed to accord so well with the pale young face of the composer. The fascination of the languor which seemed to emanate from the man and from his work worked its way, in a subtle manner, into the hearts of his hearers. One of these was the controversial, cross-dressing, Aurore Dupin Dudevant, better known under her non de plume, George Sand. It was their mutual friend, the composer, pianist and ultimate showman, Franz Liszt who introduced them.

Chopin, by all accounts an extremely sensitive artist, dreaded meeting "this woman above all women, as, like a priestess of Delphi, she said so many things that the others could not have said. Undaunted, she made the first advances. It is easy to see what charmed her in him. In the first place, he appealed to her as he did to all women, and then, too, there was the absolute contrast of their two opposite natures. She was all force, of an expansive, exuberant nature. He was very discreet, reserved and mysterious. Such a contrast may prove a strong attraction, and then, too, George Sand was very sensitive to the charm of music. But what she saw above all in Chopin was the typical artist, just as she understood the artist, a dreamer, lost in the clouds, incapable of any activity that was practical, a "lover of the impossible." And then, too, he was ill. When her former lover, the author and poet Alfred de Musset left Venice, after all the atrocious nights she had spent at his bedside, she wrote: "Whom shall I have now to look after and tend?" In Chopin she found that someone. But at a dreadful cost to both their physical and emotional health.

The Hollow Crown

Friday and Saturday, April 5 & 6, 2013

"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings . . .
For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp . . ."

The above is a passage from Shakespeare's Richard II which sets the stage and forms the basis of The Hollow Crown. It was devised by John Barton in 1961 for the Royal Shakespeare Company as a celebratory entertainment by and about the kings and queens of England, and its informative, yet lively, entertaining glimpses of British history have since delighted audiences from London to Broadway From the death of William in 1066 to Queen Victoria's description of her coronation, a quartet of readers present poetry and extracts from plays as well as speeches, letters and diaries from monarchs over a period of 800 years. Also included are chronicles of their contemporaries and self-styled historians, (including a very witty teen-aged Jane Austen) describing their lives and reigns with mordant humor, sympathy and stinging satire.

The readings are delectably supported by music of the relevant period, including songs, vocal ensembles and arias by John Dowland, Henry Purcell and by a few of the monarchs themselves, notably Richard the Lion-Hearted and the infamous Henry VIII.

West Side: West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, Rocky River | 8:00pm - Friday, April 5, 2013

East Side: First Unitarian Church, Shaker Heights
8:00pm – Saturday, April 6, 2013

Walt Whitman – I Sing the Body Electric

A Second Commission for the Lakewood Public Library
In Celebration of National Poetry Month, April, 2013

In 1855, a poetry collection appeared by an unknown 36-year-old poet, until then known primarily as a printer, teacher, and journalist. The twelve poems contained within were some of the most daring, musical, poignant, and joyful poems to have been published in the United States. They were written in a distinctly American voice and were about American men and women. Their author, Walt Whitman, wanted nothing less than to unite a fraying nation under the banner of his poetic voice.

Whitman spent the rest of his life working on Leaves of Grass, revising, expanding, and deleting its poems up until the final edition issued two months before his death in 1892. The poems and their poet were both hailed as genius and denounced as the most obscene filth. One hundred and fifty years after Leaves of Grass first appeared, we have at last come to understand their author as a gifted translator of the American consciousness. We also know that he was a master of self-promotion, an American patriot, a fiercely independent person, and a tireless observer of human nature. "Whatever you do, do not prettify me," Whitman told one biographer. "Include all the hells and damns." For a poet who spared nothing in his verse, it makes sense that his life story should be told honestly as well. The WordStage presentation will use material from Whitman's own letters, diaries, and poetical works - as well as material from his contemporary chroniclers and critics. The Music will be drawn from the Civil war Era, and some songs set to the texts of his poetry.

Performed at the Lakewood Public Library Main Auditorium –
7:00pm | Thursday, April 18, 2013

Father's Day Music at the library
A Celebration of rogers and hammerstein

Sunday, June 16, 2013 — Beachwood Library

Join WordStage artists baritone Mark Wanich, pianist Matt Skitski and narrator Tim Tavcar in a tribute to fathers and fatherhood through the songs and writings of America's most renowned composer and lyricist team.

Featuring beloved familiar tunes and lesser known gems, this is an afternoon of uplifting entertainment you won't want to miss. Sponsored by the Friends of the Library.

Free tickets required for admission and are available a the branch or by calling 216-831-6868

Performed at the Beachwood Library –
2:00pm - 4:00pm | Sunday, June 16, 2013